Of course I'm being a bit unreasonable since the majority of desktop users likely are running vms and accessing it it over VNC/xRDP/Guacamole. And so require something snappy.
I'm running KDE Neon on a Lenovo T450 and an XPS 13. And the experience is great.
However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.
Actually, nowadays KDE is one of the most lightweight DEs out there. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...
The view that KDE is bloated was accurate years ago, but nowadays it's outdated.
Multi-DPI may well still be an issue.
And Plasma probably runs quite well on a 10 year old ThinkPad anyway. I run one of the latest versions of Plasma on an old x86 tablet with 1 GB of ram, a slow SSD and an Intel Atom CPU. It's just a bit slow to boot, but this was improved on the last release (I could not test it on the tablet though).
It is quite lightweight, but you probably shouldn't install the kde-full package on an old computer.
You should check out the Wayland session. They have fractional scaling working perfectly there
I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout. I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome. I had to do the same when I was using X11 with a 3.8k screen. And it still sucks.
Wayland makes the scaling seamless and perfect for all native apps.
could you detail ? the taskbar is exactly at the right size for me. The only thing I see that is blatantly bad is the text on the left sidebar of the media player.
> I also suspect you've had to configure things quite a bit to reach this layout
The only thing I do is setting Xft.dpi = 144 in my .Xresources.
> I see for example your zoom-level is non-default in Chrome.
that is because I keep playing with my middle button when I'm reading :) before taking the screenshot I had it at 250%
EDIT: just realized that you're not using wayland ..
Hear, hear! So you are not using firefox? All the XWayland apps are blurry.
KDE/Plasma apps are crisp. But to be fair, Gnome had experimental fractional scaling on Wayland two years ago.
Plasma 5.17 on Wayland gained fractional scaling support. Works good for KDE apps, blurry on XWayland apps such as Thunderbird and Firefox. However, when you start
GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox
firefox isn't usable, but sharp. Still a long way to go as it seems.
If it's about the HiDPI autodetection you should try Tumbleweed, Qt has many HiDPI related fixes there and sddm works OOTB.